Monthly Archives: December 2018

As we bid goodbye to 2018 – and why wouldn’t we want to? – it is time to take a very brief – we don’t need to look too closely or we might become a little despondent – look at what the past year has been all about.

One thing, above all else, stands out from a crowded year. Human rights. Just about everything that has occurred this year has had at its core the subject of, neglect of, denial of, striving for or abuse of, human rights. I don’t think I need to go into all the specifics of these things. If you don’t agree with my assessment, stop wasting your time, go read somewhere else.

We, as a people today, place great emphasis on the rights of human beings, and consider it of such importance that organisations at all levels of human society have been set up to define and/or enforce what we think of as an unalienable and irrevocable part of our heritage within the human family. Yet the very fact that this has been thought necessary, speaks volumes as to the fragility of our position even amongst ourselves.

I pulled this quote, a brief definition of human rights, from the latest book I am reading, which was the final ‘spark’ I needed to write this piece:

‘…rights to the benefits of culture, to property, to the preservation of health, life, physical integrity, security, and a means of subsistence, and to residence, movement, and inviolability of the home.’

Let us ask ourselves the question: If we require, for peace of mind and physical well-being , such rules of law around our personal rights, enforcible, though quite obviously often ignored, waived, or indeed frequently and rudely stomped on, among the human community, even now, in what is supposed to be an enlightened age of cultural enrichment, economic prosperity and advanced technological progress –

a) How will, or do, we fare as but a small though influential part of the natural world and life of our home planet, when that natural world presents itself as less benign or implacable, and much more forcefully antagonistic to our shared existence here than it has fortuitously been in the recent past of our living memory?

b) How will we fare on this issue in a time when our ‘enlightened age of cultural enrichment, economic prosperity and advanced technological progress’ is somehow removed or ripped away from our grasp and we are plunged into a state of much lowered expectations or even into a ‘survival of the fittest’ situation?

I feel sure you will understand to what I am referring there. The two most pressing of a whole bunch of unwelcome strangers knocking at our door – Climate Change and Imminent Economic Collapse. The former being a now unstoppable inevitability which is even now breaking down the last barriers of natural resistance to thoroughly overwhelm us in the immediate to long term future – like it or not. The latter almost as inevitable because of our innate inability to stop and think about what we are doing, leave alone any possibility that we may unilaterally decide to change our way of life to accept ‘less’. The usual obscene spending spree of the past week, pledges to that thought.

These things, either acting separately or together, will bring to an end once and for all the question of human rights, bringing with them an eventual, perhaps even an abrupt, overturning of all that has come to mean human society and civilisation. And without that overarching structure in place at all levels of human society, the concept of ‘rights’ will have no meaning – at least for a while – and think, if you have any concept of history, how long a struggle it has been to get to where we are today of those issues, and how relatively ineffective that progress is even today.

So, what have we to look forward to, as the page of history turns once more?

Hh-hh-hh-hh-h. (that was a resigned and suppressed – no heaving of either chest or shoulders – chuckle)

Welcome to 2019, which may well be the year that marks the end of human rights.

…and here, from Wondermom Wannabe, and not more than a hint of sarcasm from me, is the opportunity for you to record the highlights of your life – in a free, printable, review of 2018…

While I am sure that many would attempt it, there is actually no-one who could successfully raise a fact-based, logically sound argument against that premise.

If the West, led by America, has its way, the planet we now live on will be turned into a vast prison system where numbers will be forcefully kept down to only sufficient slaves to adequately produce the resource needs of the ruling elite. There is only one nation, possibly assisted by a few others, that stands solidly in the way of the realisation of such a nightmare. That nation is Russia.

This would more than adequately explain the exuberant posturing and rabid polemic (mostly false) railed against the Russian Federation by Western government and media alike in recent times. And, of course, the vast sums the West is prepared to spend (a loosely defined term for ‘raise debt to buy’) on military manpower and munitions to back up (another loosely defined term for ‘use coercively in a threatening way or for sabre-rattling maneuvers’) their attacks on Russia.

So, what does this mean? What action will Russia take? What does the West expect Russia to do? Capitulate? Surrender? Accede to the West’s expectations to rule the world and shape it as it sees fit? Or call the West’s bluff, as being only a fanciful notion? Steel its reserve for possibly bolder moves by the West? How far is Russia prepared to go to preserve its identity?

I will entrust to readers intelligence what they make of that, but I will just make a couple of further statements. One is that I don’t believe, even for a second, that Russia, under President Putin (and for as long as he holds the reins), has any intention of capitulating to the West in any way whatsoever. I believe he has made that abundantly clear. The West then has two main options:

Continue the overt baiting and demonisation of Russia while waiting for, and covertly working towards, a more opportune moment for a takeover/capitulation. The downside to this plan is that such a moment may never happen.

Push for a flare-up (actually ‘keep’ pushing for a flare-up, since provocation is one of their main games) that will ensure and in their own minds justify a move to open armed conflict, relying on their massive military to somehow bungle and bruise its way to gaining them a superior position (not hopeful, based on their past record – Russia is not Iraq). The downside of that unlikely outcome is that they could easily end up with nothing – a pyrrhic victory. President Putin has already made it abundantly clear that, and I paraphrase, “If there is to be no Russia, there will be no ‘anywhere’.” – and he, of all people, has the power to make that happen.

So, where does the ‘worse than Nazis’ thing come into this? Well, you wouldn’t be asking that question if you had read the linked article.

But, stepping back a little, is this all leaning too much on the worrying side? Did Solzhenitsyn have the West truly pegged? Or should we all be ‘ready to die’?

To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.

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Favourite Quotes

Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings, that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
The Buddha

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein

Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
Albert Schweitzer

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford

Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Henry Kissinger (Who controlled Henry Kissinger?)

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
Henry Thoreau

Many people today work jobs they don’t like, to buy things they don’t need, so that they can impress people they don’t like. But at the end of life these people will deeply regret spending their lives trying to impress other people. Be humble and seek to impress yourself only. Let other people worry about chasing status. This perspective is extremely liberating.
Simplicity Institute

What I hear, I forget;
what I see, I remember;
what I do, I understand.
Old Chinese saying

It is the microbes that will have the last word.
Louis Pasteur

We have already seen cuts to services and increases in taxes and user fees, and we can expect a great deal more of that dynamic as central authorities emulate hypothermic bodies. In other words, they will cut off the circulation to the fingers and toes in order to preserve the core. This is of course, a survival strategy, from the point of view of the core. But it does nothing good for the prospects of ordinary people, who represent the fingers and the toes.
Nicole Foss

Society is an anonymous enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions.
Josephin Peladan 1885

Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.
John Michael Greer (The Archdruids Report)

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
Rainer Maria Rilke

In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.
Thomas Stearns Eliot

Talk does not cook the rice.
Chinese Proverb

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

...western Health Care... is mostly, a method of social control and a means to generate economic growth.
William Hunter Duncan (http://offthegridmpls.blogspot.com.au/)

...gardening puts me at ease in a world where it is not easy to be at ease, comforted in the knowledge that, should the world change, I will be ready, or more ready anyway, than I would be had I pretended I am not part of this earth, that I am not part of ecosystems. I am of this earth, and every day my plants remind me.
William Hunter Duncan (http://offthegridmpls.blogspot.com.au/)

The general population doesn't know what is happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.
Noam Chomsky

Life wasn't meant to be easy, my child, but take courage: it can be delightful!
George Bernard Shaw

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
Vernon Howard

When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly.
Michael T. Klare - The Hunger Wars in Our Future

Remember that fact and faith are mutually exclusive things. If you have facts you have proof, therefore you don't need faith. Conversely, with no facts there is no proof and faith is needed to believe something. But faith is more emotion than logic, so almost anything can be justified. And that's where the Church gets its power.
Martin I Henry - The Anunnaki (The Chronicles of the Guardians)

...from nature’s perspective, we’re simply one more species that overshot the carrying capacity of its environment and is about to pay the routine price...
John Michael Greer - The Falling Years: An Inhumanist Vision

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Ben Okri

Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
JH Kunstler http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/are-you-going-to-entropy-faire.html

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present.
Rebecca Solnit
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175701/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_what_comes_after_hope/

To claim that there are many gods, a few gods, only one god, or no gods at all is to insist on something about which human beings have no independently verifiable source of information whatsoever.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/a-question-of-values.html

Knowing many stories is wisdom.
Knowing no stories is ignorance.
Knowing only one story is death.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2006/05/knowing-only-one-story.html

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts. The Blight which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We are more wicked together than separately. If you are ever forced to be in a crowd, then most of all you should withdraw into yourself. Never trust another to do your thinking. Even a maston.
Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey - from The Blight of Muirwood (Legends of Muirwood Book 2) by Jeff Wheeler.